Norman Vincent Peale, minister and author of "The Power of Positive Thinking.' Mr. Peale was the pastor for the Trump family for decades.
Truthfully, the daily headlines have infuriated me since The Damn Fool was inaugurated 1/20/17 (and even before that).
But nothing has infuriated me more than all of the “happy talk,” utter nonsense, and denial of the plain reality that we all can see and experience since the COVID-19 crisis began; a denial that reached deeply absurd levels of tragedy/comedy/horror when the sitting *resident of the United States suggested that the citizens that he’s supposed to serve and protect should try injecting disinfectant and bleach into their bodies and and shine UV-rays into themselves in order to inoculate themselves against COVID-19.
I mean, where does anyone learn to think and say stupid shit like that?
(Furthermore, who actually would listen to stupid shit like that?)
As The Damn Fool’s happy talk during the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated, I began to increasingly recall a couple of stories that Norman Vincent Peale, the author of the 1950’s bestseller “The Power of Positive Thinking,” was also the Trump family minister/pastor.
Now, the last thing that I ever want to do is to take a deep dive into the brain and thoughts of Donald Trump; in fact, I am sick and tired of MSM reporting that purports to do exactly that.
And for that reason, I really do not want to do a deep dive into Norman Vincent Peale’s works and ministry. So...I looked at Peale’s Wikipedia bio, the two Politico stories written about the Peale/Trump connection (Gwenda Blair’s 2015 Politico piece on Peale/Trump is the very first link in this diary). I also managed to find a copy of The Power of Positive Thinking online and I began reading it as well.
True to what the Wikipeda bio described, The Power of Positive Thinking is loaded with ancedotes consisting of the basic formula of turn all of your problems...and reality, itself, over to the god of The Bible and pray and all will be well...which isn’t my cup of tea, exactly. Frankly, many of the anecdotes aren’t all that unfamiliar; there are stories in 12-Step literature like them and even some of Peale’s “ten sensible, workable rules...” have antecedents in some of the 12-Step literature that I have read (not all of which I agree with).
But the ancedote of driving the car on the icy road is really...bothersome...I’ll post a screenshot of the story and explain why I find that specific story to be...rather dangerous and even...unnecessary.
The “two clips” at the end of the page are prayers or affirmations that the driver says to himself...there, I don’t need to add a screenshot of the next page!
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I have never known how to drive, really, have never had a driver’s license. Yet I do remember one-time attempting to drive the company van out of a UPS driver’s path using something kinda like the “power of positive thinking” (how hard could this be?, I asked myself). The company van, somehow, wound up in the middle of Adams Street between State and Wabash (downtown Chicago) at the beginning of rush hour. I survived it, the company van survived, there was no big pile-up in downtown Chicago at the beginning of rush hour.
Thinking about it soon afterward, how much easier things would have been had I simply admitted to not having the necessary preparation to move the company van. How much easier for myself and others to admit I know what I don’t know.
I was not prepared. The “power of positive thinking,” it seems to me, does little or no good when one isn’t adequately prepared.
Which...isn’t exactly the problem of the driver in Peale’s anecdote. After all, the driver is a traveling salesman, he can drive, he has some personal issues and...the reality is that he’sdriving on an icy road.
Which would be dangerous under many circumstances.
I even take special note in this story that Peale says that “we had plenty of time”: another indication that the driver was adequately prepared for the situation.
An icy road is probably not the time to be working on your internal inadequacy issues. Nor does the icy road care about your inadequacy issues.
To be somewhat fair to Peale, there are some good suggestions at the beginning of The Power of Positive Thinking: seek counseling of some sort, get to know thyself, find reasons for living, taking a quiet time/meditation/visualization time; these weren’t new techniques and suggestions when he wrote them. Leaving aside the overly Christian angle, there’s not much of a difference between Peale’s teachings and Marianne Williamson’s teachings to be honest which…
Yeah, I’m a 52 year old gay man. Of course, I didn’t (and don’t) want to contract the HIV virus, but to this very day, I know to be prepared to minimize that possibility (I have almost always kept a condom in my wallet).
Whatever one thinks of Norman Vincent Peale’s teachings (not my cup of tea!), The Damn Fool has perverted and misused those teachings to a frightening degree in order to create and live in his own reality.
I remember when I heard the “American Carnage” portion of The Damn Fool’s Inaugural speech, I said to myself, that’s going to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
And here we are: 80,000 dead in a few weeks from highly contagious virus that continues to rapidly spread and kill many more people. Many of the preparations that this country made for such an event were dismantled and, even so, this, the wealthiest country on the planet with more than adequate resources to, nevertheless, deal with the problem at hand seems defenseless and useless because of the power of Donald John Trump’s thinking.
Which is now an American reality.
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